The $3,500 Modbook Pro is a MacBook Pro in a 13.3-inch OS X tablet

Do Apple users secretly lust after the Windows 8 tablets that have the guts of a full computer but in a tablet form factor? Modbook certainly thinks so. We first heard about the Modbook Pro back in July but weren’t sure of a release date or pricing. Available now, the company is offering an Intel-powered tablet running Mac OS X that starts at $3,500.

Built by the same team behind Axiotron, which was known for turning MacBooks into slates before the company folded in 2008 when its backer Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the Modbook Pro is the latest after-market mod device from the rebranded Modbook crew. Like its predecessors, the Modbook Pro only looks like a tablet: it doesn’t have a touchscreen (OS X doesn’t support touch controls), but it does come with a 1024-point digitizer from Wacom to give it some pen capabilities so you can sketch and annotate your screen captures similar to that of the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Technically, the Modbook Pro is just a mid-2012 MacBook Pro stuffed into the body of a slate. So rather than sport a 13.3-inch Retina display, this tablet-wannabe has a 1280 x 800 resolution screen. Like a full laptop, the Modbook Pro manages to squeeze in a DVD burning SuperDrive, an Ethernet port, and one USB 3.0 port into a relatively small device. That said, no one will be confusing the Modbook Pro for an iPad mini competitor any time soon: the slate-like device weighs a hefty 5.4 pounds, so it feels more like a traditional laptop than a tablet.

For $3,500, you can get a dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 120GB solid-state drive (SSD) under the hood. But if you have even more money to burn, you can opt for the i7 chip, with double the RAM, a 480GB SSD, and even dual-boot Windows 7 (Windows 8 is not an option) for just under $5,020.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just buy a Windows 8 tablet and install OS X onto it? Would you spend this much on a super-powered OS X-running tablet?